2026 Recipients of the Evelyn V. Hess Award

Mary K. Crow, MD

Mary (Peggy) K. Crow, M.D., is Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine and Professor of Immunology in its Graduate School of Medical Sciences. Dr. Crow is also Mary K. Crow Chair in Immunology and Inflammation Research, Senior Scientist and Co-Director of the Inflammation and Autoimmunity Program at Hospital for Special Surgery’s Biological Sciences Institute.  Dr. Crow received rheumatology training at Hospital for Special Surgery and post-doctoral research training in immunology at Rockefeller University. Dr. Crow’s research has investigated the immunopathogenesis of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), and she continues to study the cellular and cytokine mediators and molecular pathways involved in the autoimmunity and tissue damage that cause disease in patients with lupus. Her research has supported type I interferon as a critical contributor to the pathogenesis of SLE, and by dissecting the immune responses of patients with lupus, she identified molecular targets that are the focus of successful drug development programs, including CD40 ligand and the type I interferon pathway. Her leadership roles have included president of the American College of Rheumatology, president of the Henry Kunkel Society, chair of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Lupus Research Alliance, and chair of the Medical and Scientific Advisory Committee of the Arthritis Foundation. From 2010-2020 she served as Physician-in-Chief of Hospital for Special Surgery. In 2017 Dr. Crow was named an honorary member of the European League Against Rheumatism, in 2018 she received the Presidential Gold Medal of the American College of Rheumatology in recognition of outstanding contributions to rheumatology over an entire career, in 2022 she received the Lee C. Howley, Sr. Prize for Arthritis Scientific Research from the Arthritis Foundation, and in 2025 she was named a Master of the Pan-American League of Rheumatology.  

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Gary Gilkeson, MD

Gary Gilkeson, MD was born in Houston, Texas and grew up in Kansas and Oklahoma.  He earned his  bachelor’s degree from Baylor University  and attended the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School.  After completing an internal medicine residency program at UNC Chapel Hill, he served four years as an Air Force medical officer. He then completed a rheumatology fellowship at Duke University where he remained on the faculty for seven years before moving in 1996 to the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) and the Ralph H Johnson VA Medical Center in Charleston in 1996. He devoted his career to the clinical care of people living with lupus and lupus research.  Under the tutelage of Dr. David Pisetsky at Duke University, he pursued studies to better understand the role of bacterial DNA in inducing lupus. During this time, he also evaluated  the role of reactive intermediates in tissue damage in lupus. He was fortunate to be a lupus ‘mouse doctor’ early in his career and at a time when derivation of knockout mice by Dr. Oliver Smithies at UNC was on the horizon. The explosion of investigators making knockout mice. The subsequent growth in knockout-mouse research led Dr. Gilkeson to develop 12 models with alterations in genes that modulate nitric oxide synthase, complement proteins, estrogen receptors, HDAC proteins, PPARs, Fc receptors, and DNA repair proteins. In 2003, he initiated the development of MUSC’s first cohort of primarily Black lupus patients, which now includes over 800 patients at this point.  The Gullah individuals on South Carolina’s Sea Islands of made major contributions to this work, resulting in over 40 collaborative lupus genetics publications. more recently, Dr. Gilkeson completed a trial of mesenchymal stromal cells in treating refractory lupus utilizing technology provided by collaborators in Nanjing, China, a study funded, in part, by the Lupus Foundation of America from preclinical to clinical trial phase and beyond. He is especially proud of being a mentor to a number of successful lupus investigators including Jim Oates, MD, who is Chair of Rheumatology (and Gary’s boss) and was Dr. Joy Buie’s mentor; Dr. Diane Kamen, his clinical trial collaborator of 24 years; and, Dr. Melissa Cunningham, his mentee turned colleague of over 15 years. The LFA is a key contributor to his success serving 15 years as the Medical and Scientific Council Chair and on the Board of Directors making lifelong friends and supporters. He and his wife Mary Ann have been  married for 51 years and have two children, Austin and Jenna and three grandsons. He and Mary Ann spend a lot of their time now working with Helping Children Worldwide in Bo, Sierra Leone where he consults on a biweekly basis with the medical staff at Mercy Hospital.  He this summer completed his 13th trip to Sierra Leone.  He semi-retired as of July 1, 2026 devoting his time to ongoing research including the MiSLE trial.